Oy Vey over Taipei

The Cold War casts a long shadow, and in Asia it never really ended. India and the Philippines have localized maoist rebels. There are still two Koreas. As many tend to forget, there are still two Chinas as well. Thanks to President Trump’s recent chat over the phone with the president of Taiwan, America’s geographically illiterate are learning that.

Chinese history is long and complicated so I will spare you most of it; the short version is that China’s colossal civil war in the first half of the 20th century ended without Total Celestial Victory. Communists took over the mainland and ejected the nationalists/republicans to the island of Taiwan. Both sides still exist, in the People’s Republic of China (Chynah) and Republic of China (Taiwan), respectively. The problem, naturally, is that both countries claim to be China and want the world to recognize their side as the one trve China. The PRC goes as far as to claim it in fact governs Taiwan.

In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, most of the world considered Taiwan to be the de jure China. But then and now, to hold “Taiwan” to be China and the PRC to be not-China is an ideological choice, one that requires rejecting the reality of a communist victory. The Republic of China was and is a rump state, and in the 1970s after the Sino-Soviet split and republican China losing its UN seat to communist China, President Nixon recognized the People’s Republic of China as China. Thus American objections to the legitimacy of communist China were settled.

This left the Republic of China in limbo as Taiwan, since no superpower recognized it as China. And why would anyone if not for ideological reasons? Look at a map and tell me which country you think is the actual China. Moreover, Taiwan has no ability to press its claims against China. China on the other hand… does. So Taiwan remains closer to the Pacific countries (including the meddling United States) than it does to mainland China. It’s a geopolitical necessity given that China would annex it if allowed to. And many of those countries fear domination by China, which logically places them in the Taiwanese camp.

President Trump’s actions broke a longstanding precedent of the American and Taiwanese heads of state not communicating directly with one another. To do so amounts to diplomatic recognition: I agree that you are the leader of the government you say you are the leader of, and that your government represents the territory it says it does.

Well, in theory. In practice, President Trump is hardly signaling that he supports Bonnie Prince Taipei’s claims to the Celestial Kingdom. Rather, I see it as him trolling the country he made an object of vitriol during the campaign season, Chynah. Bigly. Because what better way to mess with a bunch of hivepeople than to tell them that their sacred consensus is wrong?

America First means looking at things from the perspective of what the interests of the United States are. Does it particularly matter if China thinks other countries should not directly communicate with the government of Taiwan because it hurts their prestige? How dare they presuppose they have the authority to decide who we as a country communicate with. Are we a Chinese tributary? The decision to directly communicate with Taiwan is as much a way to snub the communist Chinese as it is to signal an independent foreign policy. If President Trump wants to treat Taiwan as a sovereign state and its government as existent, which it has been de facto for decades, then China’s problem is less other countries recognizing Taiwan and more that Taiwan is recognizable as a distinct state from China.

But again, I don’t think President Trump’s action is meant to recognize Taiwan’s pretense to sovereignty over all of China. He’s going by instinct or by advice, and imperative is just to do as one pleases. It’s a big f–k you to a rejected node of authority. Like the entire campaign was. It also means the apoplectic, anti-Trump press now has to defend communist, “job-stealing,” currency-manipulating China. I don’t think the populists will like that very much.

The worst thing about Nixon’s China opening is that he sold Chiang Kai-Shek down the river and got jack shit in return. Zhou Enlai refused to move forward beyond the Paris channel or the New York back channel (Kissinger met with Huang Hua in an apartment used by whores near the UN, heh) until Kissinger finally truly broke through with North Vietnam in early 1973. Even after the Paris Peace Accords, the PRC was
shipping arms into Haiphong, which were of course used in the eventual rout of South Vietnam in 1975.

One of the first things the PRC did when we opened the liaison offices was to start flooding the U.S. market with cheap textiles, and they refused to even release some of our pilots who’d been captured during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and didn’t release some of our funds which they’d seized in the 1949 takeover, which the “poor suffering Jews in the Soviet Union”-inspired Jackson-Vanik bill only made more difficult.

They were still a completely backwards country by modern standards, made even more so by the Cultural Revolution, and now in dire straits after the border clash
with the Soviet Union and fiery disagreements over the Soviet intervention in the Prague Spring in ’68. Despite all that, they knew that Nixon and Kissinger were coming to them from a point of weakness, with the country exhausted by the Vietnam War, which they pushed to full advantage by dictating the terms of negotiation. They shit-talked us in the UN right before and after meeting Winston Lord and our people,
insisted that all meetings be held by U.S. officials making the trip to Beijing, were belligerent in island clashes with South Vietnam, and took advantage of the U.S. in the cultural exchange programs by hosting Black Panthers and other radicals. They sent loads of students to the U.S. to learn all our secrets while strictly controlling and monitoring the few people of ours they allowed into China, whom they conspicuously
had their merchants and hotel owners rip off for “revenge” after the “century of humiliation” before and after the Boxer Rebellion.

All the progress in relations died with Watergate, Ford’s post-Nixon pardon weakness, Reagan’s challenge to Ford, and the deaths of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and disruption after the Gang of Four’s attempted coup.

By the time Carter got into office, he wanted to fully establish relations with the PRC and drop the ROC entirely, which he did, for reasons of “sentiment” from his missionary days, as he recorded in his notably piously titled “Keeping Faith.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Press, and Leonard Woodcock ended up having sly little Deng Xiaoping get a complete runaround on them. We had a modest trade surplus with the PRC at the time, but Carter had Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps, Treasury Secretary Michael (((Blumenthal))), and Energy Secretary James (((Schlesinger))) trade the farm to Deng, some of our most precious offshore oil, landsat, and other technology, in return for what soon became a treasure trove of intellectual property theft, a massive trade deficit, and not a bit of improvement in the “human rights” that Carter initially based his foreign policy upon, as Tiananmen Square took the mask off the image of Deng Xiaoping as a reformer in anything but modernizing the PRC’s economy. Decades later, we continue to get ripped off by them while we rip ourselves off keeping Japan’s SDF down with Article 9, keep the South Korean forces intact despite the end of the Cold War, as we take it in the pants from China and send treasure out of the country while they pirate and steal and counter us on the UNSC
they’re only on because Nixon long ago thought they’d help put pressure on North Vietnam, which they didn’t.

One funny little incident occurred when the wife of one of our diplomats tried to visit a PRC official in Beijing in 1976. She was herself Chinese, so she was refused entry because “everyone knows Americans are White.” Marine guards later returned the favor to Huang Zhen in the Washington, DC embassy, but it’s curious to think that as recently as just a few decades ago it was inconceivable to people that anyone but a White person could possibly be an American.